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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The problem with being an auto-didact is one I've seen elsewhere, and not just in computing.
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You can learn a lot of stuff on your own, but at some point you get stuck, inevitably, because there are things you can't come up with yourself, simply because some of them require YEARS of study to discover.
As I said, I hit a wall at around 15-16, when I just couldn't improve the chess engine anymore. Refactoring wasn't even an option, because everything was tangled with everything (I now know).
Other walls I've hit are playing Chess and Go.
It's well known that, for most people with some keen interest, an ELO-rating of 1800-1850 in Chess, and a strength of 5 kyu in Go are attainable just by playing a lot to gather experience, but at that point, there's a wall you can't climb by just 'playing even more.'
I've never actively studied chess, or Go, and my strengths are... well... ELO 1835 in Chess, and 6 - 4 Kyu in Go, exactly what can be expected. to advance, I'd need a teacher in both games to show me the stuff I don't know I don't know.
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It's the designer part that's critical. I've seen too many people jumping in and writing code with only a vague notion of what the code is supposed to do, and no knowledge at all of the current practices and workflows of the folks who are the intended users. That works about as you would expect, which is not at all.
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I follow a YouTube-channel, called The Coding Train, by Daniel Shiffman. Sometimes, it's very cheesy, but he explains mathematical concepts very well, and visualizes them using the Processing an p5.js languages/frameworks.
He is an MSc. in math, and it shows. Whenever he 'just' needs to put a formula into a function and write some stuff to visualize it, everything goes very well. A month ago, he tried to write an implementation of the game
2048.
As usual, he jumped in without any design or plan, and then he got stuck. After hours of jacking around with the code, he had to abandon his attempt (in Processeing), only to restart a month later in p5.js.
He did manage to get the game mechanics coded and had a lot of fun doing it, but from a software engineer's standpoint, it wasn't pretty.
He has stated numerous times that he teaches "programming": I *HOPE* he teaches how to visualize mathematical concepts and data, because he does that very well. If he teaches software engineering, well... let's say there will be some VERY poor software engineers coming from New York University.
This guy should teach Maths, not programming, and certainly *NOT* software engineering.
(Note that I'm not trying to bash Michael Shiffman. He is a great teacher, and his channel is fun to watch. He is good at clearly explaining difficult subjects in a fun way, and good at visualizing data. He is, however, very poor at writing maintainable code... but I guess that's not the point of his channel.)